Oscar Wilde said: An idea that does not involve risk does not deserve to be an idea.

Risks and responsibility in advertising

“An idea that hasn’t been done before might, on the surface, look really risky, argues Bob Isherwood, worldwide creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi. It’s an area where no one has been before. There is no precedent. But usually the biggest risk lies in ideas that are predictable, because ideas that are predictable don’t get noticed. You can’t sell anything to anyone unless they notice you. To get a boring ad noticed, you’ve got to run it lots and lots of times. If you’ve got a really original message, you only need to run it a few times. People retain the message longer and it costs the client less.

People think the low risk thing is not to run the high risk idea, observes Stow. The biggest risk is to be safe, because if you’re safe you’re invisible and you waste your money.

A lot of creative people think creative risk-taking means doing stuff that scares the life out of you, says Singapore creative director Garry Abbott. The leaders of the industry, the Tim Delaneys and people like that, come up with things that are completely new which come out of nowhere; certainly not from last year’s award books. They don’t rely on borrowed ideas. Risk is about freshness. Ideas you haven’t seen before. They give everyone a buzz, and they give the consumers a buzz because they’re regaled with the sameness of advertising. Risk is about breaking rules. Abbott believes advertising should not have many rules. We are supposed to be on the cutting edge of communications, yet we keep falling back on the same old things.

Risks must be taken at two levels, advises Mackay. One is the risk of listening to the consumer, because when we hear what the consumer is thinking and feeling and dreaming, it might not coincide with our preconceptions. Going to the consumer and saying, tell me your story so I can really see what it’s like to be you so I can respond to that, is a risk that creative people and clients are rarely prepared to take fully. The second risk? I would define creativity as taking a set of familiar elements and rearranging them in an unfamiliar way so that the audience recognises both the familiarity and the unfamiliarity. In other words, present something the audience will recognise as themselves, their lives, their dreams, but with a twist, so they’re actually a bit startled by it, or will get an extra insight from it. So it’s not just a mirror, it’s a mirror that’s craked. The safe thing is to say ‘Well, the consumer said I like X, Y and Z, so let’s show them X, Y and Z’. But that’s not creativity; that’s journalism. Creativity is saying that’s what the consumer feels, that’s the dream, that’s the aspiration, that’s the raw material we’re working with. Now we have to be creative with it, or we’ll just be part of the bland advertising landscape and not be noticed”

I’m currently reading Cutting edge advertising, by Jim Aitchison. An edgy book on how to create the world’s best print for brands in the 21st century. So it was Aitchison who gave me this half-funky idea, to start a blog display section for the best print ads I’m digging around.

Now let me rewind just a little to Jim Aitchison. Mainly cause I highly recommend his book. To make it short, Aitchison’s cutting edge “advice” goes mas o menos like this: throw out every damn thing you hold dear! Throw out everything you’ve ever learnt. Throw it to the ground, stamp on it and grind it into dust. This, and this is the only way will you be really creative. Learn things anew. See things from a different perspective. Learn to love words and what they are capable of.

I’d say this is a hell of a Carlsberg-advice. Meaning probably the best in the world.

Every page of his book is filled with heavyweights in the industry, from Indra Sinha and Neil French to David Abbot and Bob Barrie. So much so, turning a page is a real pain. So much to learn, so few pages. A little tip here. A big idea there. A fantastic way of looking at things everywhere else. Combined with neat little examples and you have a book that will practically sell itself. And it has. Incredibly well, too. They even came out with a second (Cutting Edge Commercials) and third (Cutting Edge Radio) and a revised edition of the first. In short. A brilliant book. Nah! This still isn’t a good enough review to call cutting edge. Let’s see. Nah! That’s not good either. So instead of a review I’ll give you a PS: If you wanna go into advertising, you have to UNLEARN EVERYTHING.And Jim Aitchison it just might be the right man to teach you how.

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Jim Aitchison is the former creative director of an advertising agency in Singapore. Beside advertising and business books, he also published fiction, under the pseudonym of James Lee.

Be still, be calm, be quiet now, my precious ad-boys
Don’t struggle like that or I will only love you more
For it’s much too late to get away or turn on the light
The Copywriter is having you for dinner tonight. : D

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GB is an unapologetically unreconstructed hippie and devoutly politically incorrect. She sold her soul to Guns 'N' Roses in the 90s, bought her first good electric guitar from Slash's ex-wife in Detroit, and never looked back. She /sometimes/ writes fiction (you figured it out after the "Slash's ex-wife in Detroit" part, didn't you?), nonfiction, and some things she can’t quite define. Also, she can turn bullshit into articles. She’s been published in her obscure blog, and two or three local newspapers, leaving behind digital traces like glitter. Like most snobbish wiseguys, she also pretends to know everything about everything, until questioned. :D